Euro Disney Case Study

Both Disneyland in Anaheim, California and Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida were and still are to great success. Tokyo Disney followed with a slow start but quickly became a successful cash cow like the 2 parks in the United States. Disney next projected success was Euro Disney, today it goes by DIsney Paris. Disney was confident and quite optimistic that the 4th Disney theme park, located just over 30 minutes drive from one of the worlds biggest tourist attractions, Paris would be no different. Some would say a little too confident. However, Disney made some major planning mistakes in many different points of the overall business plan. This lead to a downward spiral into bottomless pit of failure, fast. From day 1, the theme park destined for greatness became a major disaster. How could such a historically successful corporation achieve what management, executives and other high ranking individuals of Disney sought impossible? DIsney made various planning mistakes in Euro Disney 's business plan. This is hard to believe considering the time it took to develop said plan. Some of these mistakes were more detrimental than others but they all contributed to a profitless theme park. Two major flaws covering a few aspects stood out to me as very detrimental to Euro Disney 's chances at success. The biggest flaw was that the business plan was looked at from an American point of view and Disney did so in all sorts of areas. To start off, Disney assumed that European visitors would not be very different from the visitors- foreign and domestic- at US parks. Of course they were wrong, European visitors spending patters and lengths of stay were far different when not traveling to the U.S.. They also were mistaken when using the U.S. Disney visitors to population ratio. Basically they reasoned that since Disney parks in the U.S. (population 250 million) attracted 41 million visitors, then Euro Disney 's attendance could reach 60 million with Western Europe 's population of